The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [25]
This is not to say that you have to dictate what the follow-up is supposed to be. No—that is another mistake most executives make. All you have to do is have meetings where these things are discussed and developed. This is to say that you should have great follow-up procedures, but the folks in the trenches can help develop them. They will buy in much better to procedures that they themselves helped to create. This chapter explains how.
It is essential that you schedule at least one hour a week to work on the three Ps. In the words of my good friend Michael Gerber (author of E-Myth), this is working on the business, not just in the business. CEOs of large businesses, and businesses that want to be large, must do more of this. Here’s how.
Many organizations achieve small, if any, real improvement year in and year out and CEOs don’t know where to begin to change this. A typical problem I see over and over again is that the CEO or department head believes that he has to think of all the solutions to every problem that arises in his company or department. If you have a good staff, they will fill you with ideas on not just the problems but how to fix them, even ones you didn’t know existed. Just ask them. I always tell my clients, “If you have a good staff, the only thing you need to bring to a meeting or workshop is your judgment.”
Keep in mind that when you ask your people what the problems are, they’re going to tell you. You might not like what you hear. But this is the first step to finding and fixing the leaks and glitches holding you back from being the Ultimate Sales Machine.
Workshops
Workshops are an excellent method of focusing your mind and every one else’s on solutions and improvements within your organization. Work-shopping means that instead of you talking and your staff listening, all of you get to work together on a problem, developing the ideas and insights to propel the company forward. If you are a medium-or small-sized company, you can invite every employee to participate. You never know from where the big ideas are going to come. Sometimes receptionists offer excellent solutions to problems in other departments because they are the first point of contact with any customer, so they may understand the customers’ needs better than the high-level executives. Large companies should have workshop meetings every week for every department.
The Benefits of Workshop Training
Workshops help the company bond together as a team. Often, if you ask six people the same question, you will get six different answers. For example, if you ask six people at many companies what’s the most important strength of their company, product, or ser vice, you will get six diverging answers. That is not a good thing, and workshops will help you to unite employees and create a more powerful vision at every level of the company. Even more important, workshops offer an opportunity to create synergy in your organization. You will find that the ideas you generate as a group will be light-years ahead of what any one of you, including the CEO or department head, would have created on your own. At the same time, workshops also give the company or department leader a rare opportunity to influence attitudes, ideas, and the direction of the company.
Step-by-Step to an Outstanding Workshop
The first thing you need to do is schedule your weekly meetings with your staff. If your organization consists of fewer than 30 people, you can have the entire staff in your first workshop. If you have more than 30 people, you may have department-specific workshops. If you are a one-person army, you can do the workshops by yourself and the result will still be profound. Schedule workshops for the next year and put them on the company calendar as nonnegotiable requirements of every one’s job. Start them this week.
Next, you need to decide what you are going to work on in your first meeting. You may have an obvious thorn in your side—like the lack of good time management practices or an ineffective